Two NGOs, the South African Legal Resources Centre (LRC) and the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), have been found to have had their rights violated by GCHQ's mass surveillance systems. Both organisations are co-claimants alongside others, including Privacy International and Liberty, in a legal challenge brought against GCHQ. "Last year it was revealed that GCHQ were eavesdropping on sacrosanct lawyer-client conversations. Now we learn they've been spying on human rights groups. What kind of signal are British authorities sending to despotic regimes and those who risk their lives to challenge them all over the world?" said James Welch, legal director for Liberty in a statement.

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According to the IPT, a court dedicated to holding public bodies to account over covert activities, GCHQ failed to follow its own secret procedures for dealing with the communications it collected, and this is what made its actions unlawful. In the case of EIPR, members of which have been persecuted in Egypt, GCHQ was found guilty of retaining communications "for materially longer than permitted".

Communications from the LRC, on the other hand, were unlawfully selected for examination in contravention of GCHQ's secret procedures that were "not followed in this case". The organisation is known for tackling some of the most oppressive aspects of apartheid, for helping to draft South Africa's new constitution and for fighting to secure tenancy and education rights.

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Janet Love, national director of the LRC, said the organisation was "deeply concerned" by the news. "As a public interest law firm, our communications are self-evidently confidential, and we consider this to be a serious breach of the rights of our organisation and the individuals concerned. We can no longer accept the conduct of the intelligence services acting under such a pernicious veil of secrecy, and we will be taking immediate action to try to establish more information," she said in a statement.

The court did not, however, find the interception of the NGOs' communications unlawful in and of itself -- something that privacy advocates said was astonishing. "Clearly our spy agencies have lost their way," said Eric King, deputy director of Privacy International. "For too long they've been trusted with too much power, and too few rules for them to protect against abuse. How many more problems with GCHQ's secret procedures have to be revealed for them to be brought under control?"

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It has been neither confirmed nor denied as to whether other privacy and rights organisations, including claimants Liberty and Privacy, also had their communications intercepted -- only that if they have, that the IPT has not deemed that surveillance unlawful. The only reason we know for sure that GCHQ has been spying on EIPR and the LRC is that those particular actions were ruled as being unlawful.

Privacy International has pointed out that many aspects of the ruling today remain unclear. In particular, we do not know why it was deemed necessary or proportionate to spy on civil liberties organisations. "If spying on human rights NGOs isn't off-limits for GCHQ, then what is?" said King. "Mass, suspicionless surveillance can never be justified."